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Truths to tell

Early in this wonderful collection of short stories, an inarticulate Australian teenager runs his eye over a few pages of Crime and Punishment, looks puzzled, and says, “Interesting, eh?” Young Charlie Dowd, trying on his father’s greatcoat before he goes off to the Vietnam war, gazes at himself in a long wardrobe mirror and thinks he resembles a French cavalry officer in War and Peace. Later, he sits very still on the edge of his bed, “the way the characters do in a Russian novel before a journey”. David Malouf earns the right to mingle in this literary company.

Time and place are defined throughout with attentive care. One story takes us to a blue Tuscan night where a solitary cancer patient is hooked on “neat starlight”, but everything else happens in Australia, often in Malouf’s native Queensland. A boy